His insights do indicate one thing: that he doesn't understand the rigor required to engineer safety-critical systems.
Isn't that kind of the point? Tesla would have L4 if the architecture was built right, but it wasn't, and now they're scrambling.
I think George made it very clear that the architecture is what these companies spending billions are getting wrong. Tech debt is more expensive than you think at the cutting edge.
You know what is total fluff? Tesla FSD. Disgusting. At least comma is honest about their hardware, and that's about all it comes down to.
And yet the architectures he disapproves are the only ones who have shown fully autonomous driving is possible. There are driverless robotaxis running now, albeit in small areas but expanding.
> You know what is total fluff? Tesla FSD. Disgusting. At least comma is honest about their hardware, and that's about all it comes down to.
I fully agree.
They did not.
> There are driverless robotaxis running now, albeit in small areas but expanding.
Running in small areas shows that they can drive in small mapped out areas under specific conditions. Not that we have fully autonomous self driving.
That is fully autonomous driving. It's just classified as Level 4. Geofences and operating conditions can be extended to provide a real, useful taxi service to a lot of people.
Tesla also uses maps, it’s just less detailed. If humans are able to drive without maps, why does Tesla require a map of lane geometry, stop signs and intersections?
Humans combine low-res maps with extremely good visual odometry & spatial reasoning. Computers don't come close to the way humans reason about space & vision yet, so stronger priors help to make up the difference.
Making it scalable to keep an updated exact map of an area is part of the work L4 companies have been doing. I think it's hard for folks on the outside to really know just how much progress has been made here. Before Google Maps existed folks didn't think you could scalably map the world either.
It's not like companies like Cruise or Waymo want to keep doing this if they can help it. It's pretty disingenuous to say that these companies don't have any incentive to jump off the mapping wagon as soon as the tech to do so exists.
In fact, L4 companies do have to deal with areas they're driving where they see the map is outdated (often these are construction zones). So either they have mapless driving capabilities to handle these cases, or they do something else (seems like Cruise cars love pulling over en masse, lol)
I don't think there's anything wrong with trying to refine that approach as much as openpilot did, and honestly if there was fruit in SAE Level 3 and above, I feel like we would have seen it by now, but we haven't.
I have no idea what you mean by "problems several orders of magnitude." Driving is driving. Your hardware and software can do it, or it can't. What do billions of dollars have to do with anything?
Should people remind you Meta spent billions of dollars on a less popular Second Life?
How would you explain to shareholders that your solution can't compete with openpilot?
So… how much would you bet on this?
It makes Tesla Full Self Driving look like a joke, in my opinion.
The bet is on this though -- what's impractical about having L4 fleets in major cities that replace Uber/Lyft? Just because you can't personally own one doesn't mean that in 10 years they can't be pretty ubiquitous and practical, particularly for city dwellers, which is most people. I'd bet that your statement is wrong on this basis. L4 cars already exist and are being used in large portions of San Francisco today.
And this is to say nothing of trucking & delivery, where self driving is in some ways easier to solve and a lot of progress is being made.
And I personally don't think the industry is mature enough to accept the realities and limitations of the technology we work with to just say, "Hey, actually, we can let attentive drivers basically be hands-free for 80+% of their drives."
And to me, that would be great.
> And I personally don't think the industry is mature enough to accept the realities and limitations of the technology we work with to just say, "Hey, actually, we can let attentive drivers basically be hands-free for 80+% of their drives."
Uh isn't this what Tesla, GM, Mobileye, Comma, and many others are doing? Basically every player in "the industry" wants this & is working on it -- FWIW I think L2 is fine, but there need to be more safety features because the number of folks who've slept while their flawed L2 system drove them is truly alarming. I'm less worried about their safety and more worried about the folks they might crash into.
Yeah, no one wants this.
I'm also mystified: do you really think personal car ownership for every person is at all sustainable?
George Hotz thinks Comma does the job with only a fraction of the spending compared to the likes of Waymo, Cruise, Zoox, but fails to realize his product also does only a fraction of what the others are trying to do.
If you were trying to build L4, you'd hire a small team of exceptional engineers, and spend a few thousand on hardware tests. Billions doesn't come close.
You'd try and get Level 2 to be as satisfactory as possible, and see what percentage of the time you could achieve Level 3.
Not sure if you are aware that the self driving (robotaxi) companies have spent tens of billions of dollars in the last decade. R&D expenses are huge, building custom sensors and vehicles is hard and fleet maintenance/operations is costly.
Okay, that should let you just about afford to certify an Ethernet cable.
He may be right that we won't get there broadly for 10 years, but I think that's a rationalization of how things have gone for him, and the fact that the methods he has worked on don't have a chance of getting there, rather than the thesis he had when he started comma. Because if this was your thesis, there was really no reason to get into the space when he did.
In particular, Waymo One is already an L4 driver. It operates completely autonomously and passengers do not have the option of taking over. I don't know how often they get stuck and have to call someone to do roadside service, etc, but clearly in some areas it is already feasible. So the question is whether this is possible in dense urban areas or not.
And if you're just looking at SAE 2, the main competitors in this space, Mobileye and Tesla are doing way better than comma.
I definitely thought progress would be faster here, but I don't think we're anywhere near as far away from useful systems as geohot argues.
You have no idea exactly how limited the service is. Effectively, you can't go ANYWHERE in the Phoenix metro area unless your A-to-B destination is squarely in that region. That's not Level 4. Whatever pretend system they've got going on, I'm sure works perfectly on those particular pristine roads, but no one is using Waymo.
There are no real, coast-to-coast Level 4 systems.
Clearly there is non-zero development risk here, but I don't think it's going so badly that it's definitely going to take 10+ years to launch in a metro area with millions of people.
It may take a decade to get to a coast-to-coast system, but there's not a whole lot of incentive to build that vs serving a few large metros in the near future.
We've had the technology for level 2 for 20 years. You just need to track the painted lines and track the distance to the car in front of you. Higher levels are orders of magnitude more complicated.
If you think level 2 is the best we'll get, that's fine, but that's giving up. It's not what people mean by self driving.
Considering many vehicles still do this inconsistently or poorly I’m not sure that’s an encouraging sign.